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Data From Iraqi Exiles Under Scrutiny

In the years before the war in Iraq, an exile group set up a team of analysts in Washington, underwritten by United States government funds, to distribute a steady stream of reports on Saddam Hussein to the government and the news media, according to government officials and a document the group submitted to Congress.

In a June 2002 memorandum to a Senate committee, the group, the Iraqi National Congress, described its ''information-collection program,'' and detailed how it had been able to provide reports on Iraq to the Bush administration, with which it developed close ties, and to the media.

''Defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed,'' Entifadh Qanbar, then the director of the Iraqi National Congress's Washington office, wrote to the Senate Appropriations Committee staff. The memo, dated June 26, said ''the results are reported through the I.N.C. newspaper (Al Mutamar), the Arabic and Western media and to appropriate governmental, nongovernmental and international agencies.''

A copy of the document was obtained this week from Congressional sources critical of the exile group.

In the aftermath of the occupation of Iraq and the apparent failure of the United States to find conclusive evidence of unconventional weapons in Iraq, the role of exile groups in providing prewar intelligence has come under increasing scrutiny. Congressional Democrats and other critics have argued that the White House and Pentagon relied too heavily on dubious information from the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, and other Iraqi exiles eager to topple Mr. Hussein. Mr. Chalabi is now a member of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.

Since occupation of Iraq, many officials in the American intelligence community have said that much of the information provided to Washington by the Iraqi National Congress before the war was suspect, and some have questioned whether the group provided disinformation to the United States. A review of prewar information by the Defense Intelligence Agency has already concluded that much of the information it received from Iraqi defectors, including information provided by the I.N.C., was of little or no use.

The fact that the Iraqi National Congress was disseminating information about Iraq to the United States government and the Western news media before the war has been previously reported. Less widely known is that the effort was carefully coordinated through a special analytical unit the group established in Washington that was paid for by the United States.

In the 2002 memo, the group included an organizational chart showing five analysts in charge of processing information and writing reports to be distributed to the group's own newspaper, the United States government and other recipients -- including many news organizations. The memo included the analysts' job descriptions, describing their areas of focus, including the Iraqi military, Baghdad's intelligence services and human rights. It also said a consultant was in charge of tracking Iraqi military-industrialization programs, including efforts to develop unconventional weapons.

Bush administration officials said the Iraqi National Congress's information-collection program was established during the Clinton administration, when Congress earmarked funds for it in the State Department budget.

The program was transferred from the State Department to the Pentagon in 2002, and the information it produced was then sent to the Defense Human Intelligence Service for verification and use, according to Pentagon and State Department officials.

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A State Department official said one reason that its Near East office decided it no longer wanted to handle the program was that the Iraqi National Congress seemed intent on using the program to get more involved in covert intelligence-gathering, which meant that the State Department was not the appropriate agency to manage it. The Pentagon turned the program over to military intelligence.

In an interview from Baghdad, Mr. Qanbar said that he had been the overall manager of the Iraqi National Congress's Washington office and that he was ''not an intel guy.'' But he said that the analytical unit in Washington had done ''a lot of work figuring out about Saddam's family, and the Baathists,'' and that ''it was not all about W.M.D.''

He also suggested that the group's contributions to American intelligence were more modest than many critics have charged in recent months, saying that it only provided two or three defectors to the United States before the war.

The Iraqi National Congress memo, describing the analytical work over the previous year, said the group had issued 30 reports from August 2001 through June 2002 that had been sent to Al Mutamar, the group's newspaper. It also said that the Washington office had released an additional 28 private reports in coordination with the group's London headquarters. The memo did not say where those private reports were sent.

The document says information that it describes only as ''ICP product'' -- meaning information provided by the Iraqi National Congress -- was cited in more than 100 articles in major English-language news outlets worldwide from October 2001 to May 2002. The news outlets included The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, CNN and Fox News Channel, as well as a number of others.

But the document does not spell out what information provided by the exile group was included in the articles.

One State Department official complained that, during the time the information collection program was a State Department responsibility, the exile group seemed more interested in providing information to the press than to the department.

''Generally, they were going right to the media with their stuff,'' the official said in an interview on Wednesday.

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A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 2004, on Page A00016 of the National edition with the headline: Data From Iraqi Exiles Under Scrutiny. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe